Tag Archives | Apple OS X

We pretty much knew this already, but now it’s official: Apple’s WWDC event next week will begin with a keynote on Monday. The big news at the keynote will be OS X 10.7 Lion. And the next version of iOS. “And iCloud, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.” Steve Jobs will host the keynote. (Okay, that part we didn’t know.)

Last week, one site said that it had learned that Apple’s UK PR team was urging journalists over there to make the trek to San Francisco for the event. That site came to the “obvious conclusion” that Apple must have been planning to announce the next iPhone at the keynote. I never understood what was so obvious about that conclusion. New hardware is neat, but the biggest opportunity for any phone or tablet platform to make great leaps forward lies in in its software and services. So WWDC has the opportunity to be a huge deal even if not a single new device is announced.

I’ll have more thoughts between now and Monday morning, but in the meantime: What features would you like to see in Lion, the next iOS, and/or iCloud?

ZDNet blogger Ed Bott, who’s known more for his reporting on Microsoft than on anything Apple, has been hot on this story since the get go. He reported Wednesday that as if on cue the Mac Defender creators have released a new version of the malware application that requires no password at all to install.

See, Mac users -including myself–have accurately pointed out that basically all attempted malware for the Mac required the user to enter the administrative password. If you did that, it was your own stupid fault for getting infected. With MacGuard, it’s completely different.

Apple has published instructions for removing Mac Defender–the malware I encountered yesterday in its Mac Protector variant–and says that it’s working on an OS X update that will detect and remove it automatically.

“A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.” I thought of that old wisecrack this morning when I encountered something I’d never seen before: a serious trojan attack on my Mac.

The attack in question was an instance of Mac Protector, a variant of the Mac Defender attack that’s been in the news this month (my friend Ed Bott has written about it repeatedly). I was browsing in Safari and suddenly got this window, looking a bit like OS X’s Finder and a bit like iTunes (click on it to see it at a larger size):

“At this year’s conference we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to miss.”

WWDC is one of the most important weeks in the Applesphere–the iPhone 3G, 3GS, and 4 were all announced during previous editions of the show, as was Apple’s move to Intel processors–but it’s not a given that Apple will announce any new hardware at the event. In fact, The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple, who has one of the best track records of any Apple reporter, says there won’t be any new devices. Of course, that doesn’t rule out new Apple hardware being announced before June 6th. And if all WWDC does is spell out the next version of iOS in detail, it’ll be really interesting.

MG also included historical data, and his main point is that if the trend continues, the majority of TechCrunch visitors will visit the site using an Apple device–Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad–within a couple of years.

As usual when I read numbers of these sorts, I rushed off and looked at equivalent stats for Technologizer. Here’s February 2011…

Apple has released (through the Mac App Store) a beta version of OS X 10.7 Lion to paid members of its Mac developer program–tangible evidence that the upgrade is on schedule for summer release. The OS upgrade focuses on features inspired by the iPad, such as a full-screen mode, more use of gestures, a Launchpad that looks like the iPad’s home screen, and Mission Control, which melds together the existing Exposé, Spaces, and Dashboard features. It also lets apps incorporate auto-save modes, has a new version of the Mail app, adds a no-configuration-required file-sharing feature called AirDrop, and more.